An Easy Death
CHAPTER ONE
In
the morning I got Chrissie to cut off all my hair. Tarken and Martin
would be tinkering with the truck, which was our livelihood. Galilee
would be watching Martin, because they had started seeing each other
before and after work. Or she would be cleaning her little house, or
washing her clothes. I never saw Galilee bored or idle.
But I
didn’t have to be at Martin’s until late that afternoon, so I was doing
whatever I pleased. That morning I was pleased to get rid of my hair.
My
neighbor Chrissie was not too bright, but I’d watched her trim her
husband’s hair and beard as he sat on a stool outside their cabin. She’d
done a good job. She sang as she worked, in her sweet, high voice, and
she told me about her youngest one’s adventures with a frog in the
creek.
When she was halfway done, she said, “Why you want to cut all this off? It’s so pretty.”
“It gets all sweaty and sticks to my neck,” I said. Which was true. It was only spring now, but it would be the hot season soon.
“You
better wear you a hat so your head won’t get all red and tender,”
Chrissie said. “You want it so short I think the sun might get your
scalp.”
“I’ll take care,” I said, holding up the only little mirror Chrissie
had.
I could see part of my head at a time. She’d washed it, so my hair was
wet. I thought it was about an inch long. Looked like the curl was gone,
but I wouldn’t know until it dried.
“You heading out soon? I saw
them farmers at Martin’s place, when I was coming back from the store.”
Chrissie’s trousers had long tendrils of dark hair all over ’em now.
She’d have to brush ’em.
“Yeah, we’re leaving as soon as it’s near dark.”
“Ain’t you scared?”
Sure, I was. “Of course not, the only ones should be scared are anyone who tries to get in our way.” I smiled.
“You’ll kill ’em dead, bang, bang,” Chrissie said in a singsong voice.
“Yep. Bang, bang,” I agreed.
“Why are they going to New America?”
“The farmers? The part of Texas they live in got swallowed up by Mexico a few years ago. You remember?”
Chrissie looked dim. She shook her head.
“Anyway, the government down there has been telling the Texans that they’re not real Mexicans, and their land is forfeit.”
Chrissie looked even dimmer.
“Their
land is getting taken. So if they’ve got kin up north or anywhere, even
in Dixie, they got to leave Mexico to have a chance.”
Dixie was so poor and so dangerous you’d have to be desperate to flee there.
Chrissie
ran her fingers through the short hair on the left side of my head, and
shook her head. “Anyone ever go to the HRE?” she asked.
“Chrissie,” I said. She bent around to meet my eyes.
“Oh, sorry, Lizbeth.” She began to work on the right side,
following
her own whim. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen her cut anyone’s
hair besides Norton’s. “I forgot you don’t like them grigoris.”
No. I did not like magicians.
“Tarken
know you’re doing this?” she said after a moment. I could tell by the
faraway sound of her voice that the question had come from her mouth,
not her head.
“No, he doesn’t have a say in my hair. Don’t you go telling.”
“He’ll see it this afternoon.”
“Yeah, it’s a surprise,” I said.
Chrissie gave me one of those looks that reminded me she was older than I was. “He ain’t gonna like it, Lizbeth.”
I
raised up my shoulders, very carefully, because I didn’t want to jolt
her hand. “Not his head,” I said, and that was the truth. But it was
also true that he’d tried to tell me how I should do something one time
too many.
When Chrissie had finished, and the little mirror told
me it was cut evenly all over—God knows how—I paid her. She gave me a
big smile before she carried the chair inside. She came back out to pump
some water to wash her hands, and put some in a bucket to toss around,
trying to spread out the long, dark hair that lay in a heap where the
chair had stood.
I gave her a hand. When the dirt didn’t look like the sky had snowed black ringlets, I went uphill to my place.
Getting
ready to leave didn’t take long. We should only be gone maybe three
nights, at most. And we might even spring for a room in one of the
hotels in Corbin . . . providing Tarken was speaking to me by then. We’d
get the farmers up to their waiting family, then we’d come right home.
It was the most common run we made, and
Martin
and Tarken had cleared a road to there, mostly on an old paved one.
They’d moved all the big rocks and trees, scouted out the likely ambush
sites, and so on.
Corbin was over the border in New America,
which was where almost all our cargo was bound. It was a bustling town
with a number of places to stay, a garage for cars, a stable for horses,
a post office, a good general store.
I’d worked for Tarken for
two years now, maybe a bit over, and he’d been my man for four months.
The first time we went to bed, he told me he’d been waiting until I was
old enough.
I hadn’t even realized he was looking at me. I’m slow that way. But I’m quick with a gun, that’s what counts.
I
would never have known I had a talent if my stepfather, Jackson, hadn’t
taken me hunting with him when I was little. Jackson had seen me snatch
a fly out of the air, he told me later, and he’d thought I had the
quick hands and the instincts you needed to be a gunnie.
Jackson
was right. The first time I held a rifle in my hands, I knew I’d found
my calling. My mother didn’t like it, of course, but at least I could
support myself—and be out in the open—doing something useful. People
need protection.
I stuck a pair of pants and a shirt into my
small leather bag, a pair of underpants, my toothbrush, and a comb.
Packing was done. I’d fill my canteens before I left.
Next I
cleaned my old 1873 Winchester, a lever action and a great rifle. It had
been my grandfather’s. He’d called it Jackhammer, so I did, too.
Jackson had given me matched Colt 1911s for close work, and those were
already clean after my last target-shooting session out in the empty
land around Segundo Mexia. I could fire
twenty-seven
bullets with all three, had extra magazines ready for the Colts. If I
couldn’t bring our enemies down with that much firepower, our enemies
had an army.
Galilee would bring her rifle, a Krag, since she was
better at long shooting. I’d use the Winchester for the nearer work.
She and Martin and Tarken all had pistols, too, though Tarken’s was less
than a great tool.
Our truck and our firepower had worked for two years. We’d made this same run often.
Winchester
in its sling over my back, pistols in their holsters and ready to go,
two full canteens on one shoulder, my little leather bag with clothes
and extra ammo on another; I was ready. I set off down the path to town.
People
were coming home from work, and Chrissie was cooking on a grill outside
her cabin, the smoke rising up and the smell of meat giving the air a
nice tang. “Good shooting!” she called in her soft voice.
I nodded. I passed Rex Santino. “Easy death,” he said in his gruff way.
That’s what people wished gunnies. It made me feel good. I nodded back at him.
I
didn’t want to walk down Main Street. There were too many people. One
of them was my mother, who lived with Jackson in a real nice house just
off Main. She didn’t like to see me leave on a job. That weakened me,
too. I took a roundabout way to Martin’s house, which was situated in a
bare dirt lot on the last street north in Segundo Mexia.
Martin’s
chickens squawked in their pen as I came into the yard. He was strewing
feed and smiling, just a little. He sure liked those
stupid
chickens. His neighbor’s kids would come in to feed them while Martin
was gone, in exchange for eggs. We do a lot of barter in Segundo Mexia.
The
setting sun struck Martin’s head with a golden glow. For the first time
I noticed that his light hair had a lot of gray sprinkled in. I would
pick my time to tease him about it.
Galilee wasn’t there yet.
Tarken was putting the cans of extra gas on the bed of the truck, and he
gave me a sideways smile, which froze when he realized my hair was
gone. After a minute he closed his eyes, shook his head, and started
back to working.
I’d hear about this later. I smiled. It was going to be fun.
Most
of the cargo was sitting on the dirt of the yard or on Martin’s front
porch. Two of the children were playing a game of hopscotch on the grid
they’d drawn in the dirt. I nodded in their direction. I would talk to
them when I couldn’t dodge it.
The sky went lower, the people on
the porch shared out food among themselves, and I went into Martin’s
kitchen and ate some bread and some dried fruit. I couldn’t handle meat
before a job.
Galilee came in to sit with me, her Krag under her
arm. She had on a gun belt with one pistol, maybe not as fine as my
Colts—but the Colts were courtesy of Jackson, so I didn’t crow about
them . . . much. Her hair stood out from her head like a huge black
puff, and she was very skinny and dark. “My friend, you look a sight,”
she said when she got a good look at me.
“Yeah. Like it?”
“Hell, no. You had the prettiest white-person hair I ever saw. Why’d you do it?”
“Tarken liked it too much.”
“So you decided you’d show him what was what.”
I shrugged. “More or less.”
“Girl. Sometimes I can tell you are so young.”
I
didn’t know what that meant, so I didn’t answer. Only, I’d figured
since Tarken spent so long running his fingers through my hair,
straightening out each ringlet to watch it bounce back into curl, he’d
better pay more attention to the girl whose scalp it grew on.
Galilee
talked about other stuff. “Freedom built a chair for his little house,”
she told me. Her son Freedom, who’d been born when Galilee was only
fourteen, had moved out of his mom’s house when he left school and had
gotten a job at the tannery. Now he’d built his own place. (And a
chair.)
“He going to find a carpenter to apprentice to?” I
couldn’t think of anyone around who’d be ready to hire. Bobby Saw
already had a girl working for him.
Galilee lost some smile. “You know Freedom. That boy can’t stick with nothing. At least, not that he’s found yet.”
“That
boy” and I were nearly the same age. At least Freedom had stuck with
the tannery job. Though he didn’t like the work, it was steady money. He
kept looking for something else, but nothing had suited him yet. Last
time I’d seen him in a bar, he’d groused about it nonstop. He was lucky
his girlfriend was sticking with him. Complaining is not attractive.
Martin
came in to get a drink, kissed Galilee on the cheek as he went by. My
eyebrows tried to climb into my hair, what was left of it. “Well,” I
said when he’d gone back out. “You’re out in the open with it. When did
that happen?”
She didn’t meet my eyes, but she was smiling again.
“Just seemed like it was time. We’re getting along good, we want to
spend more time together than we are. Ain’t no big thing.”
“Yet.”
“Yet,” she agreed.
“Lizbeth,” Tarken called from the yard.
“Time
to work,” Galilee said, and we washed our plates and went to the
outhouse and then to the truck. It was spring, days lengthening, and the
sun didn’t want to give up the sky. There were no clouds, and I stood
looking up, seeing the vastness above me, nothing between me and the
hereafter. I had my place, standing here on this dirt.
Tarken gave us the nod. He and Martin were taking one last-minute look at the engine.
Galilee
and I turned to the cargo. “Time to load up,” I called. “Sit in the
center, looking out. Her and me, we got to stand up, her at the right
side close to the back, me at the left side, closer to the front.” I
pointed. I had to be clear. They were nervous.
Tarken would cover the straight-ahead from the passenger seat in the cab.
Martin
had already arranged their bags against the sides, with two gaps left
for me and Galilee just where we wanted them. The cargo had brought too
much stuff, but they’d tried to pack it all in. They hated to leave
things. This was all they had in the world.
The long, flat bed
had sides Martin and Tarken had built, wooden uprights and horizontal
planks, to hold everyone and everything in. Provided a little
protection, too. And that gave Galilee and me a stable frame to lean on.
We would go in last.
The families were standing, milling around, putting it off. “Load up,” I called with a little more push to my voice.
They
obeyed. One man went in first, to help pull up the wives and the
children, while the other remained on the ground to boost ’em up. The
younger couple had a baby and a couple of littles, maybe
six
and four. The older couple had a girl, grown, and another girl about
thirteen, and a boy, younger but not a baby. The men were brothers.
They’d had farms side by side in south Texas, but when it had become
Mexico, they had gradually been pushed out. Their older brother, they’d
told Martin, was the one paying for their trip to New America. He was
smarter; he’d sold his farm while he still had title to it, and bought
land north of Corbin.
It seemed to take a long time, but finally
they were all in. Galilee and I scrambled up and took our places. It was
Galilee’s turn to talk.
“Hear me,” she said, and they all turned
their faces to her. Dixie people wouldn’t have listened to a black
woman, but these farmers did. She had the way and voice of someone who
knew what she was doing. Her rifle spoke for her, too.
Galilee
gave them the usual lecture about staying low and helping us keep watch.
They all nodded, even the littles, scared just about shitless. Our
prime worry was bandits, who wanted anything they could get: guns,
goods, the human cargo. The guns and goods could be used or sold. The
humans could be robbed or raped, and then sold to a bordello that wasn’t
too choosy.
If the New America patrols stopped us, we’d be fine.
People were legal cargo, and respectable people like this were even
welcome in New America. But if bandits caught us, well, that was why
Galilee and I were on duty. That was why the oldest brother had hired us
to get the two families through the lawless land along the border
between Texoma and New America.
Martin had climbed into the
driver’s seat, and Tarken had taken the shotgun position, as usual. I
stretched forward to rap on the cab roof, letting them know she’d made
the speech. The engine began to rumble, and we lurched out of the yard.
As
we were leaving Segundo Mexia, I spotted Freedom walking by the side of
the road and gave him a yell. At the sight of the truck, he took off
his hat and waved it at his mother, who raised her hand in farewell.
“See you soon, son!” she called.
I
could feel the farm people’s eyes going from the boy to his mother. The
two were not exactly the same color. Galilee had gotten pregnant by the
son of the landowner her parents worked for. Her parents had sacrificed
to help Galilee run away. In Dixie, kids who didn’t look like their
black mothers were in for a very hard time.
After many
adventures, mostly bad, some good, Galilee had ended up in Segundo
Mexia. But along the way, she’d learned to shoot. She had a skill. I
trusted her with my life.
We were on a good part of the road, one
that hadn’t been broken. There were still stretches around like that.
My mother had told me that once almost all the roads were smooth, and
that when they cracked, they got repaired. It sounded like a fancy
dream. Since we were with the cargo, Galilee caught my eye and raised
her rifle just a little. She was asking if I expected trouble.
Kind of to my own surprise, I nodded.
Galilee’s eyebrows went up. She was asking me why.
“Full moon,” I mouthed, with a tiny point upward.
Galilee
shook her head, looking exasperated, her puff of hair flying around her
face. She held up three fingers. Nothing had happened for the last
three trips.
I held one hand palm up. Anybody’s guess, I was telling her. I didn’t want to jinx us.
Most
likely, nothing would happen. We’d done this run dozens of times since
I’d joined the crew. We’d had firefights, sure. We’d
lost one crew member, an older guy named Solly. He’d taken a bullet to the stomach.
His had been the opposite of an easy death.
But
we’d always gotten our cargo where they intended to go, except for two
souls. One woman’s appendix had ruptured (at least that’s what we
thought had happened), and she’d died in the middle of nowhere. One boy
had been snakebit, and we couldn’t control snakes. So we had a good
record.
I clamped down hard on my bad feeling and stuffed it away to nowhere. I had to be all in this moment.
“You
don’t look any older than my seventeen-year-old,” said the older farm
wife. Her husband had called her Ruth. Ruth glanced at her daughter with
pride and fondness.
“I’m older.” By barely two years.
Ruth
wanted to say more. She was trying to look at my shorn head without
making a federal case of it. She decided against comment. Good. I didn’t
want to talk to them, get to know them. In less than a day, they’d be
gone.
I remember running my hand over my short hair. Thinking my
skull felt clean and cool as the air whooshed over it. I was pleased
with the feeling, though Tarken had given me several more fierce faces
while we were loading up.
But Martin had laughed. “You better buy a dress,” he’d said, “so we can remember you’re a girl.”
“You’d
never mistake this one for a boy,” Galilee had answered. “Now, me . .
.” And she’d looked down at her slim body. But Martin had looked as
though he liked her just like she was. It was nice.
When we set out, there was enough light that we could make out the landscape—scrubby bushes and cactus, the low, rolling bumps
we called hills. Same as everywhere around Segundo Mexia. There were rocky outcrops here and there. Lots of bare dirt.
As
Martin usually did, he followed the remains of the north road. After an
hour he had to go slower. We’d reached a section in much worse shape.
Might have been laid sometime in the late twenties, never repaired
since.
The little kids had been talking to one another or asking
their parents questions that couldn’t be answered. How long it would
take, if Uncle Joshua would be in Corbin when they got there, how long
it would be before they got to his farm, if he had children they could
play with, how many cattle he had . . .
At first the adults tried
to say cheerful things, and act like all was easy and well. But
gradually they began to snap a little, and the kids shut up.
Two
hours into the run, there was no talking or laughing. The moon was full,
but there were some clouds between me and it, and I only caught a peek
at it from time to time. I didn’t like my view of the sky being blocked.
With my left hand I held on to one of the slats; I felt a nailhead,
about my waist level, sticking out. I ran my thumb over it. I told
myself I’d see to that when we returned.
Because of the clouds,
Martin was running with headlights, had to. So even if the engine noise
didn’t announce we were coming, the headlights did. Galilee and I were
paying attention, watching for anything on the ground on either side of
the dusty road. That was our job. And we were doing it just as well as
usual.
Every other time we’d been attacked, we’d seen movement,
heard yelling, caught a glint of our headlights reflecting off metal.
Some clue, some warning.
Tonight the bullets came out of nowhere.
I
yelled “Down!” as I fired back, working the lever immediately to
chamber another round. I’d marked the flash pretty accurately. The
bandit was close. A scream told me I’d gotten him. But there was someone
else a bit farther back from the road, out of my range, and I didn’t
kill him in time. He didn’t die before he got a bullet through the cab.
Later
I figured the bandit killed Martin with that shot. Because the truck
started veering all over and I had to grab the slats to stay in the
truck. No way I could fire back. I’d heard the sound of Galilee’s Krag,
but she was closer to the open rear of the flatbed than I was. I guess
she couldn’t grab hold in time. One second Galilee was there. The next
she was gone, without a sound.
Tarken must have reached over to
grab the wheel to try to keep us going, because we straightened out for a
few seconds. That was long enough for me to get my balance, fire a shot
to let the bandits know we were still putting up a fight. I heard the
familiar sound of the driver’s door opening, and I glimpsed Martin’s
body tumbling out of the cab. Tarken had shoved him out to take the
driver’s seat. When Martin’s body hit the road, it kind of bounced and
then lay still.
Some excited gunman had shot at the movement of
the body, and the bullet ricocheted off the hood of the truck, and I was
stung by the tiny fragments that were flung out by the impact.
But
I couldn’t think about any of this because the headlights raked a
figure scrambling through the scrubby trees along the road to keep up.
Even as I fired at the bandit, I saw he’d stopped and aimed. The truck
lurched, my gun belt caught on the damn nail, and the world came to an
end.
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